.NET

There is one small and nice object to object mapper called AutoMapper. I gave it a little try and I found it very useful. Specially if you have web service and you are using DTOs to move data between client and server. Good news is that AutoMapper is able to perform these mappings and you don’t have to write more code than couple of lines. Let’s see example.

In one of my projects I had to read data from Exchange Server 2003 programmatically. I had access to Outlook Web Access that used Form Based Authentication (FBA). After some hacking and testing I got authentication part of my utility work. The point was easy – before making WebDAV requests to Exchange Server we need authentication cookies, so there is active session we can use.

During one of my current projects I wrote some useful extension methods for DateTime class. I had to write custom

One cool feature of C# 3.0 is support of anonymous types. Let’s suppose we have to create some data structure and we need this structure in one place in one method. This far we had to create a new private class or structure. With anonymous types we don’t have to define new type – we can create it on the run.

C# 3.0 introduced us new language feature: type inference using keyword var. Some guys think that var in C# is same thing as var in PHP. That’s wrong – var keyword in C# is totally different thing and it doesn’t mean that C# has now support for type changing class attributes. Let’s prove it.

Once I wrote a class to make paging calculations. I had some data bound user controls that had no paging support. So I had to improvise. As it is was pointless to duplicate pager code to every user control where I needed paging I wrote a class to make my life easier.

Getting distinct values from arrays is not a unique problem. Here will I show some options how to do it. We are will use array of integer in examples here. This blog entry shows you somehow the mighty evolution of .Net Framework.

I just putted up Unity behind my test project and had some troubles with singletons. There is some misleading information in documentation you should be aware of.

At the end of the previous month I wrote a posting on DefensiveDatasource class that can be used to associate ASP.NET’s GridView with collections containing objects of different types and based on one and the same base class. Dividing data into pages in GridView does, however, not succeed. An error message “The data source does not support server-side data paging” is displayed.

We recently implemented some changes in the software development methodology used at our company and quite by chance encountered an interesting .Net 2.0 problem. Namely, when an object array inherited from the same base class is cast on a base class and submitted to the data binder, the latter gets confused. The array contained objects from different classes but all these classes had one and the same base class.

Some time ago I had to clone objects and .Net’s shallow copy proved to be insufficient – it was necessary to use deep copy. No good tools are provided by .Net itself. If required, the object to be cloned must conform to the ICloneable interface and the Clone() method can be defined for the object. As the classes were not very numerous, but relatively bulky and complicated, there was no point in writing a Clone() method for all of them. I needed something else.